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Saturday, February 1, 2014

RIP to my Twitter

This blog is for cooking. It's called April's Cookin, it should be about food, I get it. But those of you who know me, know that I'm a teacher by day and serious foodie by night. I've always been transparent about this and today I have to use this blog to discuss the non-foodie side, the teacher side.

I've been teaching for 7 years and therefore I think it's safe to call this a "career." Though I have to admit that this career has been oh so rocky and bumpy and HARD. The drama is constant, and this is not just the daily drama of managing 20-30 hormonal teenagers. I'm talking about drama on top of the drama. I could regail you all with some of the wild stories I've built up from working in the schools, but this post is going to be about progression so I'm not going to re-gress back into my past. Unfortunately, I will have to share with you the latest drama so that you can see how I am going to use my setback to move forward (plus I think this is a great cautionary tale for teachers), but as for the rest of it, maybe after my cookbook is published I'll get tapped to do a memoir. Never can tell.

So anyway, over the past two years I've found a comfy home, great entertainment and actual connections on twitter. I wouldn't be here, literally, in this place in my life as a serious home cook, food blogger and food entrepreneur if it wasn't for twitter. I found a space where I could share my life in the kitchen as it was happening and the people I've met (some of you may be reading this as subscribers) have been just AWESOME! But how does the saying go? All good things must come to an end? Well, it seems like my students agree with this saying because they discovered my twitter page and made every tweet that could be interpreted as inappropriate and embarrassing public knowledge to not only other students but to my administrators as well.

Now to be clear, I'm not blaming 15 & 16 year olds for my choices. I am taking responsibility. People warned me long ago to go private but I didn't listen. I liked being public because the foodies could find me, see my work, see my tweets and jump on board. I figured if I didn't include my full name, I'd be fine. Plus I was very niaeve in my understanding of the nasty side of twitter and how a seemingly innocent tweet (a mere 140 characters) can be miscontrued, misinterpreted and literally used to bring you down. So trust me, I know where I went wrong and I learned many lessons from this experience. I know I'm lucky to have my job still (people get fired for things like this). Though I cannot sit here and tell you that having to delete my twitter wasn't heart breaking. It's been a week and I thought it would be getting easier, living without it, but those urges to tweet don't go away. I still have my Instagram and Facebook (both tightly secured) but on one I can only post pictures and on the other I don't feel comfortable sharing all my inner thoughts about cooking and eating and anything else that I love.

So here's what I've decided. I'm going to use my blog for all of my shameless sharing for the next month. It won't be the same as Twitter of course but I need to create a better blogging routine anyway and I figured that now would be a great time to start. I cook about twice a week and in the past I would share what I was doing in real time on twitter, so I will keep to that schedule and post bi-weekly or so here on April's Cookin'. I will continue to post pictures on Instagram because, as a self-proclaimed food pornographer, I cannot help myself. But I will bring all the thoughts, questions, successes, errors, accolades and anything else I can think of to the blog.

Then, once February is over and my students have moved on to destroying someone else's social media life, I will see if I can sneak back on twitter quietly and keep the blogging routine going as well. Now at this point, you may be judging me and wondering why can't I just stay away from the twitterverse? Well, all I'll say is that it's bad for business to stay away. When I return alot of things will be different but I don't let a bunch of teenagers run my classroom, I certainly wont let them think they can run my twitter page!